When they get where they’re going, outside the campus gates, when she sees the crowd that has gathered there, Sara remembers something awful: they are not the only ones who need help.
* * *
—
From far away, they look lifeless, all those people spread out in other people’s arms. The heads hang back, the necks exposed. Their arms, like Libby’s, dangle loose like something wilted. Worse are the ones on the ground, lying on their backs on the sidewalk or facedown in the grass. Who knows how they got there or who they are? Workers move through the crowd in blue suits, but Sara can see from half a block away how much the need outweighs the aid.
Slowly, very slowly, the sick are being carried onto campus on stretchers and into the white tents that loom on the college lawns. And always the helicopters, arcing across the sky, as useless as flies.
Someone in a blue suit is going around handing out gloves. Another is walking through the crowd, spraying something clear on the ground and on people’s shoes. Bleach, maybe.
A stab of longing for her father comes into Sara—she has no way of knowing where he sleeps.
An enormous man lies snoring on the sidewalk, his belly showing under his shirt. No one can lift him. He looks so alone, lying there—she can’t bear it: Maybe his family has only gone on an errand and will be back to sit with him soon. Maybe his wife has only gone to find a bathroom. Four blue suits struggle to get him onto a stretcher. The smell of urine wafts in the air.
A rumor is traveling through the crowd. An evacuation is coming. Buses.
But the boy is skeptical.
“Why would they evacuate anyone now?” he says. “That’s the exact opposite of what they’re trying to do.”
To Sara, it feels as if there is no one left out in the world, anyway, as if this is the last town on earth. The feeling stays with her, like a thing you know is both true and not true at the same time.
Some people are angry. A man keeps shouting at the soldiers. “Shame on you,” he says. “Shame on you.”
In the grass between the road and the sidewalk, a woman and a little boy lie unconscious together. Names and phone numbers are written on the boy’s overalls. Who wrote them? Sara wonders, but there’s no one to ask. A bee lands on the woman’s face. The college girl shoos it away.
On the fence around the campus, boots and suits hang from the posts, a creepy batch of laundry, drying in the sun. In the distance, the smell of burning.
“They burn the masks and gloves,” he says.
The boy and the girl leave Sara with Libby and help whoever else they can. She watches them handing out water.
Libby is lying on the grass, her head in Sara’s lap. She is holding Libby’s hand.
Libby begins to mumble in her sleep, but it’s nothing Sara can decipher. Maybe they are the lucky ones, the ones dreaming more fortunate than the ones awake. Sara drips a little more water into her sister’s mouth.
The boy is gone for a long time, and then returns with a couple of workers—for the woman and the little boy. What about her sister? she thinks. But she is too afraid to ask. It is hard to tell whether there is no order here, or if she just does not understand the order that there is. The woman and the boy are eventually scooped up by the workers—they want to take the little boy first, alone.
“Can’t you keep them together?” the girl asks. “He’s so young.”
One worker sprays the grass where they were lying.
The boy brings to Sara a piece of thick paper, like a notecard, but with a string attached.
“Write her name down on this card,” he says to Sara.
To see the letters of her sister’s name in her handwriting brings a fresh sadness. He ties the card around Libby’s little wrist and then disappears again.
After a while, Sara spots someone she knows in the crowd, her drama teacher, Mrs. Campbell. The surprise of seeing a teacher outside the classroom, and the further surprise: to see the look of suffering on her face. She is holding someone in her arms, someone sick, a man in short sleeves, a blanket draped around his narrow shoulders. She knows that man, too, she realizes. The sleeping man is Sara’s math teacher, Mr. Guitierrez. But for no reason she knows, Sara pretends not to see them.
The college girl soon comes back to check on her. She squeezes Sara’s hand. On another day, this college girl would have made her shy, this Mei, with her thick hair and her closeness to this boy, how she knows how to be in the world. But Sara thinks of none of this. There is only the rising and falling of her sister’s chest and the warmth of this older girl’s hand in hers.
“Come on,” says the boy to the girl. “You’re wasting time.”
“This is important, too,” says the girl. She stays where she is, on the sidewalk with Sara.
The feeling of that girl’s hand in hers is how she makes it through that day—to the moment, hours later, when the girl and the boy give up on the workers and carry her sister through the gates themselves, and then the way that girl walks her home to the house, where Sara will fall asleep alone—curled in her sister’s bed.
She promises, this girl, to come back later to check on Sara, but hours pass. The whole night passes. The college girl does not return.
43.
The second floor of the college library is where the youngest sick now sleep.
Here, in the makeshift pediatric ward, they sleep in cat shirts and ballet skirts. They sleep with feeding tubes taped to pink cheeks. They sleep with IVs peeking out from the sleeves of fire truck pajamas. Some sleep with stuffed animals in the crooks of their arms, put there by who knows who, a worn elephant, a floppy rabbit, a plastic baby nestled in the arms of a toddler. Some sleep with notes pinned to their clothing: their names and their phone numbers and PLEASE HELP. Some sleep, like Libby, with eyes half open to the ceiling, their little bellies rising as they dream.
Maybe their parents sleep in other rooms—in the hospital or on other floors of this library, or in the tents on the lawns outside. Or, maybe, their parents have ceased to sleep. Wherever they are, those parents are not here.
The bookshelves, pushed to the sides of the room, loom over the children’s cots while doctors and nurses in blue plastic suits check vitals, one by one.
A kind of sacredness suffuses this library. It is quiet here, except for the small sounds of their snores, the occasional cough, the steady beep and whir of the monitors, which track the workings of their little beating hearts.
But there is a certain amount of chaos here. Always, there are one or two workers wearing less protection than they should, by accident or ignorance or a shortage of the proper gear. Volunteers sometimes carry sick children right into this room with only gloves on their hands and thin paper masks, the rest of their skin exposed to contaminated air.
This is how Mei and Matthew end up in here, carrying the girl through the big double doors and up the stairs, after many hours of waiting for someone else to do it. They are suddenly breaking their last remaining rule: to stay outside the wards.
“Let’s go,” says Mei, as soon as they have left the girl in the care of a nurse.
But Matthew hesitates, mesmerized by what he sees: there must be a hundred children sleeping in here, and only a few nurses and doctors to care for them. He is suddenly alive with the work there is to do here.
“Matthew,” Mei says. “We need to leave.”
But instead, he heads toward a nearby bed. A young boy is sleeping there; his IV has come unhooked. It’s a quick fix, but no one has yet noticed.
“Come on,” says Mei. She is hot with fear.
But Matthew will not leave, even when the nurses try to shoo him out.
“I’m leaving,” says Mei.
“So then go,” he says.
And she does. Out in the sunshine, the open air, a mix of relief and guilt comes to her. He can be so infuriatin
g, this boy, so brave and so rash—what good will it do if they get themselves sick?
* * *
—
It is late that night before Matthew comes back to their tent in the yard. She wakes to the sound of the zipper coming open.
“Please don’t do that again,” says Mei.
But Matthew is vibrating, electric with a day of doing the most vital work.
“Think of how many years of life are ahead of those kids,” he says. “Their lives are worth so much more than the adults’.”
“We don’t have the right masks or suits to be working in there,” says Mei. “We’re not trained.”
He sighs hard and lies down beside her. A sticky silence comes into the tent.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “I think you’re too attached to me.”
A lump rises instantly in her throat. It is a surprise how close these feelings are to the surface.
“Aren’t you attached to me, too?” she says. She reaches for his hand. He pulls it away.
“Let me ask you something,” he says. She can tell by the way he says it that he is heading toward something abstract, some example from philosophy he read in a book. It can be tiring, late at night, this constant talk of logic, this daily parsing of ethics.
“If I was drowning,” he says. “And two strangers were also drowning nearby. And if you had to choose to save either me or the two strangers, who would you choose?” he says. “Me? Or the strangers?”
“What do you think?” says Mei.
She knows what he wants her to say. But it’s not true. Him—she would save him. Of course she would. She has not dared, these weeks, to say the word love out loud, but it feels like the right one.
“But that’s the wrong choice,” says Matthew.
A set of sirens zooms by outside, the faint flashing of red lights on his face.
“Two lives are always worth more than one,” he says. “It shouldn’t matter that you know me.”
“I don’t just know you,” she says. He can be so cold sometimes. “I guess you’re saying you wouldn’t save me?”
“See?” he says. “This is why I think love is unethical. I don’t believe in it.”
It is a shock to remember that she has only known him for a few weeks. There is a feeling of the ground falling away.
He gives more examples, but she has stopped listening. At least it is dark in this small tent—he can’t see her tears. But they are coming fast and hard. She can’t hide it for long. Maybe she doesn’t know him at all, this boy, who does not, at this moment, reach over to comfort her, even now, as she begins to sob.
“This is what I mean,” he says. “You’re too attached.”
A sudden longing for her parents blows through her, an old memory from a lonely childhood: how at least her parents would always care what happens to her.
“Why are you being so mean?” she says finally.
He answers by unzipping the tent.
“You’re missing the point,” he says as he climbs out onto the grass like he is trying to shake her off of him, get free.
Next she hears the sound of his feet crunching quickly on dried leaves as he rushes off somewhere, leaving only the noise of the crickets in the woods, the distant thrum of helicopter blades, and in her, the longing to be somewhere else.
* * *
—
After that, she cries so hard her head hurts. She thinks to call her parents, but she can’t bring herself to try. She is all alone in a strange place. A kind of numbness follows.
She finally drifts into sleep, or something close to it.
That’s when it happens, an unfamiliar feeling: some kind of presence is with her in the tent.
“Matthew,” she says or tries to say.
But Matthew is not here. Some kind of dark figure is here with her. This figure, like something human and not human—now it’s climbing up onto her chest. Something is pressing down hard on her whole body. Something is pinning her arms.
She tries to scream, but nothing comes. Her throat is closing up.
Her entire body, she understands now, has slipped out of her control, like some kind of paralysis.
It is hard to think past the immense pressure on her chest, but there is the tiniest sense of the larger possibility, that maybe this is it: the sickness. Maybe this is how it starts.
44.
First is the feeling of hands—Matthew’s—as he lifts her up from the bed. Now the echo of his voice calling her name. Mei, Mei, wake up, Mei, wake up. She is aware of a shift in the light. A breeze on her skin. He has carried her out into the yard.
It is not at all how she imagined it would be, this sleep: a twilight more than a night. The waking world is somehow seeping through.
He will take her to the campus, she knows, like they have taken all the others. But this time, those arms hanging from their sockets—those are hers. And that head lolling back, that hair streaming over the face—it’s hers.
Her eyes are closed, and yet, somehow, she can see—or she sees without seeing, without needing to see. She knows the way the cracked sidewalk glints in the sun. She can picture the ragged line of the mountains against the sky. And the clean waft of eucalyptus in the air gives rise in her mind to the spidery image of that exact tree.
One other fact glows clear in her head: the pleasure of Matthew’s attention and concern.
At some point, they arrive at the college, her body still draped in his arms. Now the cool of old buildings, the murmur of many voices, the scent of bleach in the air.
“How long has she been like this?” someone says, voice muffled, as through a mask. Someone official.
A sudden urgency swells in her. I can hear you, she wants to say, but she can’t, or she doesn’t. I’m here, she thinks, but she cannot seem to make use of her voice. I’m here.
“I don’t know when it started,” says Matthew. He is out of breath. He is talking fast. She has not heard him like this before: afraid. “I think she’s been asleep for twelve hours,” he says. “Maybe longer.”
His bare hand, unprotected, brushes the hair from her face. His goodness comes into her like electricity through his palm.
Next comes the cold penny of a stethoscope on her chest, and then her spine sinking slowly into a cot.
She will try speaking again in a little while, she decides, just a little later, when she is not quite so tired as she is now.
She has a confusing sensation that she is surrounded by books, old ones. Maybe she smells it in the air—that mustiness, the decay of thin pages. Or maybe she hears someone say it through her sleep: that they have brought her to the library, one floor down from the children’s ward.
* * *
—
She is aware of certain gaps. She has lost hold of the passage of time. Each moment floats alone, disconnected from any other.
At one point, an old story floats up, murky, into her head, from a book she read once or a movie, or just an article she saw somewhere, years earlier, about a man paralyzed in an accident. Everyone thought he was brain-dead, but he wasn’t. No one knew he was in there, still thinking and noticing and longing to connect—for years. Locked in, they called it.
A sudden terror washes through her. Can Matthew sense it, somehow, this fear? Maybe this explains why he always seems to return to her bed at these moments, his warm hand squeezing hers.
Other times are inexplicably peaceful, a gliding, everything white and distant, as if somehow leached of meaning and consequence.
There might be a feeding tube in her throat—there must be. But if there is, it is painless. And because her hands no longer move in accordance with her will, it is easy to avoid running her fingers around the plastic tube that must be taped to her cheek.
She is sometimes aware of her legs moving slightly, but she
is not in control—they move like reeds drifting in a mild current.
She is sometimes a child again, walking on the beach with her parents or helping her grandmother with the cooking, while her grandmother tells stories she only half understands in Chinese. But sometimes, instead, Mei is the grandmother, retelling those stories to her own grandchild.
She can hear the other sleepers, the snores and the breathing, a moan or a shout—the noise of their nightmares and their dreams. And otherwise: the crinkle of plastic suits, the squeak and the drone of carts rolling across the hardwood floors, the helicopters chopping in the distance.
And always, there is the musty smell of the old books rising up from the stacks around her, like soil, like roots, like the trees they once were. Maybe she is not in the library but on the shady floor of a forest. Maybe she is asleep in some unrecoverable woods.
* * *
—
At some point, her mother arrives. What a surprise it is to hear her voice—and a relief. How did you get in? she wants to ask her but cannot.
“What’s wrong with her eyes?” her mother asks, and keeps asking. “What happened to her eyes?” Mei worries that her eyes have been disfigured in her sleep, as if gouged out or removed. When she tries to open them, she understands suddenly and with a terrible certainty what has happened: the skin of her eyelids has grown down over her eyes.
And her mother, she realizes, is not here in this room. Of course she’s not. She is on the phone. Someone must be holding a phone up to her ear. Or else her mother is on speakerphone—maybe that’s why her voice is warbling like that. Or she might be on the radio, even. Her mother’s voice might be coming from the television on the other side of the room. Or through some deeper channel, as if through her brain, her blood.
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